Service Station: An XML Guru's Guide to BizTalk, Part 2Aaron Skonnard - December 2005In my last column, I provided a brief introduction to BizTalk® Server 2004 for XML developers (see Service Station: An XML Guru's Guide to BizTalk Server 2004, Part I). I covered the product evolution, core architecture, and several aspects of the underlying messaging layer, all of which have helped make BizTalk Server 2004 the powerful integration technology it is today.

Service Station: An XML Guru's Guide to BizTalk Server 2004, Part IAaron Skonnard - November 2005Who would have believed that XML, such a seemingly trivial technology, could revolutionize an industry? It may have seemed like a long shot in the beginning, but the XML aficionados saw something special and pragmatic right away—a sort of duct tape for the world's information systems.

What is BPEL4WS?: Build Better Business Processes with Web Services in BizTalk Server 2004Jon Fancey - March 2005In this article the author focuses on one critically important Web services specification that has been largely overlooked: the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL). He describes why BPEL is important and what it offers you if you are implementing Web services today or planning to in the future. Concrete examples using BizTalk Server 2004 are presented in the article.

BizTalk 2004: Automate Your Business Processes with Human Workflow Services and Visual StudioChris Whytock - October 2004BizTalk Server is an excellent platform for automating B2B and EAI workflows. Process-driven workflows send messages between machines and access data. Until now, such processes were very difficult to automate, but with the introduction of Human Workflow Services in BizTalk Server 2004, this class of workflow automation is a very real possibility. This article explains it all.

BizTalk and XML: Add E-Commerce to Your App with XML and SQL Server 2000Christian Thilmany - January 2002XML support in SQL Server lives up to the hype that's always surrounded XML. Using SQL Server 2000, you can send queries over HTTP, save XML records to the database, and retrieve records via XML. This article shows how you can take advantage of these features in SQL Server 2000 by building a database entry system that keeps track of sales and customer information. The sample app presented here uses updategrams to make the database updates. To accomplish this, the mapping and usage of updategrams is explained. In this example, BizTalk is used to illustrate the XML capabilities of SQL Server 2000.

BizTalk: Implement Design Patterns for Business Rules with Orchestration DesignerChristian Thilmany and Todd McKinney - October 2001Because the value of good software planning and design should never be underestimated, it can be beneficial to use one of the many existing design patterns as a foundation for solving some of your toughest architecture problems. This article describes several traditional design patterns including the Observer pattern and the Dispatcher pattern, elaborates on their structures, what they're used for, and how they can help you build a BizTalk-based solution. Following this is a discussion on using the BizTalk Orchestration Designer to build designs and integrate existing business processes.

BizTalk Server 2000: Architecture and Tools for Trading Partner IntegrationAaron Skonnard and Bob Laskey - May 2000This article provides an overview of the concepts involved with implementing a trading partner integration system on BizTalk Server 2000 and details the document interchange server architecture and toolset. Additionally, an early look was taken at some business process integration features planned for the production release of the product that allow easy design, execution and sharing of new business processes with trading partners. The concepts and architecture presented allow companies to prepare internal line-of-business applications and trading partners for systems that improve customer service and reduce operating costs.